Jim Bouton's Seattle Pilots: a Tale of Two Yearbooks

THE SEATTLE PILOTS published a yearbook in 1969. It's a handsome document with a navy blue cover wrapped around 40 glossy pages of standard fare biographies and statistics punctuated by color and black and white photos.

But that's not how most people came to know or why they remember Major League Baseball's one year wonders and why they'll never be forgotten.

The incendiary unofficial yearbook

The Pilots, an oddball collection of players and coaches stationed in a decrepit minor league ballpark, gained inadvertent immortality courtesy of Jim Bouton, a one-time New York Yankees phenom who lived through and chronicled the team's lone season in Ball Four the greatest baseball tell-all ever written.

Bouton died last month from a brain hemorrhage at the age of 80. He'd suffered from cerebral amyloid angiopathy, which causes blood vessels to burst. It also causes a dementia and long before it killed him, the disease -- and a 2012 stroke -- robbed Bouton of random words, facts and correlations.

That had to be a particular type of hell for a man best known by recent generations for what he said about baseball rather than what he did with one.

A young flamethrower, Bouton won 21 games for the 1963 American League champions. He won 18 the next year, plus two more in a World Series he, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Whitey Ford lost to the St. Louis Cardinals.

It was the end of an incredible 18-year run for the Bronx Bombers during which they won 15 pennants and 10 championships. It also capped a flicker of time when Bouton was among the game's best pitchers before arm trouble reduced him to a knuckle-baller barely hanging on to his career.

Despite sunshine and great promise...
(from the 1969 Seattle Pilots yearbook)

It was in that debilitated state that the former standout hurler for a legendary team came to be acquired by the American League expansion Pilots, who lasted just the 1969 season, before failing as a business and moving to Milwaukee.

An iconoclast who never missed a chance to clash with authority, Bouton chose that year to keep a diary. The resultant book, Ball Four, blew the lid off baseball's wholesome image, revealing that Mantle drank heavily, amphetamine use was rampant, players chased girls and spied on them whenever and wherever they could, owners were petty and management was often hidebound and stupid.

It was a literary yearbook and highlight film the likes of which had never been seen, a personal memoir and log book from a doomed voyage.

The less well-read official yearbook

With an ear for dialogue and an eye for human foibles, Bouton immortalized men like Gene Brabender, the Pilots' gentle giant of a pitcher. A 13-game winner, Brabender hailed from a place called Black Earth, Wisconsin, and once ended an argument with the author by telling him he was lucky it was just that. "Where I come from, we just talk for a little while. After that we start to hit," he said.

And men like pervy shortstop Ray Oyler, who sprung an erection on the team bus and offered to buy it from the driver, outfielder Steve Hovley, whose eccentricity earned him the nickname "Orbit," and pitcher Gary Bell, whose best advice for confronting any batter was simply "smoke 'em inside."

Bouton had a special affection for the Pilots' beleaguered skipper, Joe Schultz, whose favorite profanities were "shitfuck" and "fuckshit." His best advice for dealing with any situation was "pound that old Budweiser."

Bouton's ex-Yankee status gave his book gravitas and credibility. People had to take it seriously, whether they liked it or not, and many inside baseball's crumbling old order did not.

Pilots pitcher, author, idol smasher.
(from the 1969 Pilots' yearbook)

He was denounced as a Judas, a man who broke a raft of unwritten rules, an apostate unwelcome for decades at Old Timer's Day.

Ball Four also revealed something more about human nature, something that transcended baseball and applied more universally to anyone capable of independent thought but trapped in an organization ruled by group think and conventional wisdom.

Bouton was an outside-the-box thinker. Baseball wasn't ready for him, but late 1960s-early 1970s America was and remains so to this day. So Ball Four remains a testament to one man's struggles against the establishment. The New York Public library deemed it one of greatest books of the 20th Century.

Just as importantly though -- within the realm of baseball -- Ball Four was a testament to the Pilots' travails, a history of people and events that surely would have been forgotten but for Bouton's decision to make their year the year the faded former fireballer recorded for posterity.

-- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Last Call for Harvey's Wallbangers: The 1982 Brewers

When St. Louis met Milwaukee

IN THE END it came down to Gorman Thomas.

Of course it did.

By the time the Milwaukee Brewers slugger strode to the plate with two outs in the top of the ninth inning of the last game of the 1982 World Series, he was the walking embodiment of the franchise, its original building block and a last link to the team's origin as the Seattle Pilots.

The Brewers would live or die on what he did next. It was a moment 14 seasons in the making.

Thomas was the Pilots' first pick, taken 21st overall in Major League Baseball's June 1969 amateur draft. But, as he started his pro career with the Billings, Montana, Mustangs, the parent club's first and only season in Seattle was turning into a disaster.

They entered June in third place at 20-24, then slowly sank to the bottom of the AL West. Total attendance at worn-out Sicks Stadium, a minor league park meant as a temporary home during construction of a new domed stadium, was just 677,944. The Pilots were lost in a sea of red ink.

Efforts to sell them to local investors failed. Lenders called a $4 million loan. Soon they were officially bankrupt and, near the end of Spring Training 1970, gaveled to Milwaukee car salesman Allan H. "Bud" Selig, who re-named them the Brewers.

Though maligned as baseball commissioner for the World Series-killing 1994 work stoppage and then for the steroids era, Selig slowly, patiently, accrued the pieces of a contender. Maybe too slowly. Perhaps too patiently.

The joy of 1981. The expectations of 1982.

With their 1970 move to Milwaukee and the Washington Senators' relocation to Dallas-Fort Worth two years later, the Brewers shifted into the highly competitive American League East, the toughest division of its era, an era when making the playoffs required a first-place finish. Getting there meant overtaking perennial powers like the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees.

Thomas made the show in 1973. The next year, 18-year-old shortstop Robin Yount arrived. Slugging first baseman Cecil Cooper was acquired in a trade. Hard hitting outfielder Ben Oglivie too.

Sparkplug Paul Molitor came in 1978, finishing second in Rookie of the Year balloting. That same year Thomas slammed 32 homers and designated hitter Larry Hisle hit 34. Lefty Mike Caldwell won 22 games, finishing runner-up for the A.L. Cy Young Award and the Brewers won 93 games.

With all that, the team dubbed "Bambi's Bombers" in honor of manager George Bamberger, finished only third, 6.5 games behind the Yankees in a season remembered mostly for New York overtaking Boston for the A.L. East title after trailing by 14 games.

In 1979, Milwaukee moved up to second, winning 95 contests but finishing eight behind the pennant-winning Orioles. They slipped to third the following season, during which Bambi resigned due to heart trouble and was replaced by Bob "Buck" Rodgers. In 1981 they rebounded with the division's best overall record, but just half a title to show for it. They lost the first ever A.L. Division Series to the Yankees, three games to two.

The Seattle Pilots' only first-round draft pick.
(from the Brewers' 1982 yearbook).

Still, starter Pete Vuckovich had lead the league in wins and reliever Rollie Fingers' 28 saves earned him both the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards. Both men had been acquired, along with catcher Ted Simmons, for four lesser players in a December 1980 deal with the St. Louis Cardinals.

That was supposed to be the big trade that put them over the top. Now they were back in "wait 'til next year" mode. And next year started badly.

With the team wallowing at 23-24, Rodgers was fired on June 1. His replacement was long-time coach and 1959 A.L. batting champ Harvey Kuenn who, though just 51, was bedeviled by health problems. Two years earlier, a blot clot had forced doctors to amputate the lower portion of his right leg.

His leadership ignited the team, inevitably nicknamed "Harvey's Wallbangers," who went 72-43 the rest of the way. They finished first but so did the Orioles, who took three in a row from Milwaukee over the season's final weekend to pull even. For the second year in a row, the Brewers had to play a division rival for the right to play on. This time they won, 10-2.

And so it was off to Anaheim to play the California Angels in the A.L. Championship Series, but without Fingers. A month earlier, the incumbent MVP had torn a muscle in his pitching arm, ending his season. His replacement was a rookie, Pete Ladd. They promptly lost the series' first two contests, despite starting Caldwell and Vuckovich, before rallying to win the last three.

Ladd saved two of those games, including the clincher, and the Milwaukee Brewers had their first pennant and a date with the National League champion Cardinals.

A singular event in Milwaukee Brewers history

Game 1 in St. Louis saw Molitor's five hits -- a record -- pace the Brewers 17-hit assault. The final: Wallbangers 10, Red Birds 0. The Cardinals regrouped, rallying late from a 4-2 deficit to take the second game 5-4. Two nights later St. Louis won even more decisively, 6-2, in Milwaukee. The Brewers bounced back to win games 4 and 5, sending the series back to the Gateway City, needing just a single win for their first crown.

They never got it.

Avenging their game 1 drubbing, the Cards decked the Brewers, 13-1 in game 6, setting up a winner-take-all game 7 climax.

St. Louis posted a run in the bottom of the fourth. Milwaukee came back with one in the fifth and two in the sixth to lead 3-1. From there, the Cardinals took over, scoring three in the bottom of that frame to take a 4-3 lead they'd never relinquish.  The Brewers would notch just one more hit, an infield single, over the final three innings, while the Cards would add two more runs in the eighth.

Simmons and Oglivie grounded out in the ninth, bringing Gorman Thomas to the plate to face the N.L.'s best reliever, Bruce Sutter. Thomas' 39 homers had led the A.L. in 1982. It was the second time he'd done so. The Pilots pick also drove in 112 runs while batting .245.

He worked the count to 3 balls, two strikes, fouling off three straight pitches before swinging over the top of the last. Joy in St. Louis echoed as heartbreak in Milwaukee. For five seasons, the Brewers ranked as bonafide contenders in baseball's the toughest division, only to finish first runner-up.

Manager Harvey Kuenn, seated second row center, surrounded by his Wallbangers
(from the Brewers' 1983 yearbook)

Yount, who hit .331 with 29 homers and 114 runs batted in, won the 1982 A.L. Most Valuable Player award. He'd do it again in 1989, eventually accrue 3,142 hits and make the Baseball Hall of Fame. Molitor too would make the hall after racking up 3,319 hits with the Brewers and later, the Toronto Blue Jays and Minnesota Twins. Vuckovich won the 1982 A.L. Cy Young Award.

Fingers too was later enshrined in Cooperstown as was his Cardinals counterpart, Sutter. St. Louis would win the N.L. pennant again in 1985 and in '87.* But for that era's Brewers, the championship window had closed.

Milwaukee backslid to 87-75 in 1983, costing Kuenn his job at season's end. They'd endure more than a decade as an A.L. also-ran before moving to the N.L. in 1998 and wouldn't make the post season until 2008. Three years later, they played the Cardinals for the National League pennant, losing 4 games to 2.

Kuenn died in 1988. He was just 57.

In 2013, the Brewers gave away a Gorman Thomas-as-Seattle Pilot bobblehead.

* An earlier version of this post had credited the Cards with just an '87 division title. The actually went to the series that year, losing to the Minnesota Twins in seven games.

 -- Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive

Upstart Brewers Take the Yankees to the Brink - Remembering the First A.L. East Division Series

THEY RODE IN FROM THE MIDLANDS, unshaven, unkempt and unproven. Upstarts who'd never before appeared in the post season, the Milwaukee Brewers came to challenge the coiffed, corporate, pinstriped enterprise known as the New York Yankees.

One hundred Octobers after Ike Clanton's cowboys faced off against Marshal Wyatt Earp, his brothers and Doc Holliday at Tombstone, AZ's OK Corral, a new gang of have-nots arose to challenge an established order. The setting for this showdown was Yankee Stadium, a place hallowed not by tombstones, but monuments.

The once-in-a-lifetime intra-division playoff

Each faction had pushed the other to the edge.

It was the fifth and deciding game of the American League Eastern Division Series, a one-of-a-kind play-off round necessitated by a work stoppage that gutted the middle of the 1981 Major League Baseball season.

The strike had forced the Powers That Be to conjure a plan to rekindle pennant races in a season with too few games left to allow most teams to make up necessary ground.

It would be a split season. Those in first when play stopped -- including the defending division champ Yankees -- would be credited with winning half of that title. Whomever sat atop the same pile in October, got the other half.

Possession of the divisional crowns would be decided in best-of-five series played out across the quadrants of baseball.

Oct. 11, 1981

The Yankees had won the AL East four times in the previous five years, but knocking at the penthouse door since '78, the Brewers were poised to barge in and evict their overlords. The Bombers won the' first two games, in Milwaukee. The Brewers fought back, winning the next pair in New York.

Their leader, fireman Rollie Fingers, would win the '81 Cy Young award as the AL's best pitcher plus its Most Valuable Player award and -- ultimately -- election to baseball's Hall of Fame. Behind him, unkempt 6'4" starter Pete Vuckovich won 14 games to lead the league. Behind them: scruffy, slugging centerfielder Gorman Thomas, future two-time MVP Robin Yount, plus hit-machine Paul Molitor -- both of them future 3,000-hit-club members and Hall inductees -- and perennial .300 hitter Cecil Cooper.

The Yankees boasted several stars of their own. Outfielders Reggie Jackson, a/k/a "Mr. October" and Dave Winfield were Hall-bound, as was reliever Rich "Goose" Gossage. Bolstering them: three-time 20-game winner Tommy John, eventual '81 Rookie of the Year Dave Righetti and that night's starter, '78 Cy Young winner Ron Guidry, a/k/a "Louisiana Lightening," a/a/k/a "Gator."

Moose Haas, a/k/a "Moose Haas" took the mound for Milwaukee.

From that night's program, a look at the man
behind baseball's most famous mustache..

Before a crowd of 47,505, Thomas opened the scoring with a homer off Guidry in the second. Cooper drove home a run in the third. Clantons 2, Earps 0.

The lawmen retaliated in the bottom of the fourth. Yankee shortstop Larry Milbourne singled. Haas then retired Winfield on a fly ball to right. It was the last out he'd get. Jackson homered to tie the score. Designated hitter Oscar Gamble did too, giving New York the lead.

The Moose was cooked. For the second time in the series, he'd not escape the fourth inning. Mike Caldwell, ordinarily a starter, came on in relief, but the man known as The Yankee Killer for his success against the Bronx Bombers, had none, yielding two more hits and a run before being lifted too.

Establishment 4, Upstarts 2.

Guidry gave way to Righetti in the fifth. He held the Brewers scoreless until the seventh when, with two outs, Yount tripled. Cooper's single drove him home. 4-3. Catcher Rick Cerone's homer in the bottom half restored the Yankees' cushion, 5-3.

Milwaukee threatened in the eighth, coaxing two walks from Gossage but could not plate a run. It was their last rally of the season.

In the bottom of the frame, Milbourne -- the Yankees' least famous starter -- led off with his third hit of the game, a single. Winfield, who team owner George Steinbrenner would later deride as "Mr. May", flied to center completing an 0-4 night. Mr. October singled, then pinch hitter Lou Piniella's double cleared the bases. New York 7, Milwaukee 3.

The game as scored.

Molitor and Yount who collectively amassed 6,461 hits during their careers, could not muster one against Gossage in the ninth. Then Cooper, who'd driven in two of the three Brewer runs, popped out to Yankee third-baseman Graig Nettles.

Game over. Series over.

The Yankees would dispose of the Oakland A's, led by their once-and-future skipper Billy Martin, in the AL Championship Series, and then lose to the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series.

Era over.

The Bombers had a losing record in 1982 and didn't return to the post-season until 1995.

The Brewers would bounce back with aplomb. Sparked by Yount's MVP season, a Cy Young-award-winning year from Vuckovich, and an inspiring one-legged manager, Harvey Kuenn, the team nicknamed "Harvey's Wallbangers" won the '82 AL flag, but lost to the St. Louis Cardinals in a 7-game World Series.

To date, it's the only pennant they've won.

The Brewers moved to the National League in 1998.

Follow me on Twitter @paperboyarchive.